tpratchett Michael Dirda: I've reviewed Terry Pratchett off and on
over the years and have had a chance to meet from time to time.
It's always a great pleasure, as it is to be here today,
which almost didn't happen; what with --
if any of you have been traveling on the red line this morning,
you know what I'm talking about.
[laughter] My job here is to introduce Terry Pratchett to you,
but, let me ask you a question:
How many people here need an introduction to Terry Pratchett?
[laughter] I didn't think anyone would.
Basically, we have here one of the world's best writers,
funniest writers, a writer I once actually compared to Chaucer,
and I haven't taken that back.
So, without further adieu, I want to introduce Terry Pratchett.
[applause] Terry Pratchett: Thank you very much.
If you don't applaud, I can say more things.

[laughter] So, I've been to the doctor's, I had this scan,
and he said, "Hmm, have you been experiencing any memory loss?"
and I said, "Not that I recall."
[laughter] And he said, "You've been losing some brain cells."
I said, "Well, I've looked everywhere ..."
[laughter] I'd had some kind of an event sometime
in the past few years, and life was
so hectic I didn't notice what it was.
As far as we could work out, I've lost the ability to tie a necktie,
which is seriously going to affect my future.
[laughter] And I said, "You know, I hope I can't remember the 60s,
because that will mean I was there."
[laughter] Actually, I was there in the 60s, and it was dull.
It happened to about 25 -- 250 people in London,
and the rest of us read about it.
And, it has been a while of a bad time, and the curious thing is
that through it all, the writing kept going.
"Wintersmith," which I think is my best book, got written.
"Thud!" got written, and "Making Money," and large part of "Nation,"
which is the book I'm working on now and don't propose
to tell you anything about.
[laughter] It really has been a funny old time.
People come up to me and say, "Your books mean so much to me.
They got me through bad times."
They get me through bad times as well.
It's very weird; it's as if the writing is some kind of a big,
stainless steel bulldozer of some sort, which just keeps going,
and it drags me with it, usually banging my head
on stones and things like that.
But, curiously enough, it's a lot of fun.
I have to explain at the moment, I'm mildly hallucinating
because I've been on a signing tour where they don't let you sleep.
But, that's okay, because they don't let you eat either.
So, I'm in a slight hallucinatory stage.
If, when you have your book signed, I try to eat your hand --
[laughter] -- it's probably not going to be my fault.
Male Speaker [shouts from audience]: I want you to sign my hand!
Terry Pratchett: Been there, done that.
Only outside the bikini line, that's my rule.

"Making Money" was a lot of fun to write.
It's always fun to write for Moist von Lipwig.
It was amazing how much stuff my obviously crumbling brain actually
went into it.
I keep doodling an outline for "Raising Taxes," I think,
which will be the third one in the Moist von Lipwig series.
But I think I ought to write something else first
because people say, "We want another Guards one," people say,
"We want another Witches one, we want another Rincewind one."
Well, I can tell you something you're going to get: On,
I believe it's the 25th of September,
the Ion Channel will be showing "Hogfather."
[applause] You see, when we made it, we made a big mistake,
we didn't put an American in the cast.
And, if you don't have a real human being in the cast, it won't --
it's like the name "American."
It's like all the other names of primitive societies
around the world, it means "true human beings."
If you don't have a true human being in the cast, it can't be watched.
So, Terry Pratchett is Twoflower in "The Colour of Magic
and Light Fantastic," and he's absolutely superb.
You've got Christopher Lee as the voice of Death,
which was just made for him.
And I wish I could tell you who's going to play The Patrician,
but when I heard it was him, I actually wrote some extra dialogue.
And the reason I'm not going to tell you what the extra dialogue was,
I merely quoted that to a friend of mine who said,
"There's only one English actor who could deliver that line
in the right way," "And it is?"   "I'm not going to tell you."


[laughter] And we've had great fun in the shooting, and I thought,
I loved the movie of "Hogfather."
What I really liked about it was the car chase.
There wasn't one.   [laughter] That was it.

That was the great thing, because, if you're not careful,


[laughter] It was true to the book; it was true to the soul of the book;
it had a five million pound budget.
They made it look like ten million pounds.
They needed twenty million pounds.
They got a bigger budget for this one, I've seen some of the footage,
I've seen the lovely piece where Death and Twoflower escape --
where Twoflower and Rincewind escape from Death.
Wonderful two dimension and, as they're running across the lawn,
around the corner at full gallop comes Death on Binky.
And this is not CGI, this is a big horse with a big man.
And I was standing behind the camera and didn't know what to expect.
That was pretty cool stuff.
I've seen lots of other things and, yeah, I think it's likely
because Sean Astin is a true human being
that you guys might get to see it.
People always say, "What's next in the pipeline?"
I have to say, guys, there is no pipeline; there's just my head.
I am planning "I Shall Wear Midnight," which is the fourth book
in the Tiffany Aching series.
[applause] By which time I think she will have to graduate
to the adult books, and I shall have to find some other children's themes
to work on, because I like working on the children's books.
Adult books give you money; children's books give you prestige.
The first one I wrote got the Carnegie Medal,
and the thing about the Carnegie Medal is they tell you about it
for some while before they actually announce it,
and so you're going around, and you're saying, "I'd like a loaf
of bread, please, and I won the Carnegie Medal!"
Except, that bit you don't say.
"Oh, it's a nice day, I won the Carnegie Medal."
And, they're never going to give me another one,
because I ate the one they gave me.   [laughter] No, it's true.

They give you the medal twice.
Once when you win it, and then you're allowed to take it away
and sort of drool over it for a month, and then you go to a big kind
of librarian congress thing where they give it to you again.
Just enough time to work out that the Carnegie Medal is exactly the
same size as the largest piece of chocolate money that you can buy.
It was the work of a moment to put the chocolate money
in the Carnegie Medal box, which I gave to the chairman
of the organization who presented it to me, and I said,
this is to a room full of librarians, I said,
"I love this medal, this is a great medal,
this is the best medal anyone could ever get, and you know why?


[laughter] The two and a half seconds
until anyone cracked a smile were the longest in my life,
because you could see them thinking, "Was it chocolate?

Had it been chocolate all along, and we didn't know?"

And these were librarians, chocolate had slipped
through their hands, and they hadn't noticed.
Then I pulled the real one out of my pocket, you know, but I probably got
"Medal Eater" written next to my name so I won't get another one.
What else is in the news?
Oh, yeah, I think I'm signed up for two more adult books.
But, you know what?
I haven't the faintest idea what they're going to be about.
That's what makes it so much fun.
With "Nation," I started off with an image,
and it was of a boy standing all by himself, on the beach,
in the rain, looking out to sea.   It's suddenly become a big book,

but that image is still at the forefront.
With "Wintersmith," all I had was the title.
I sold it to the editors on the basis of the title.
[laughter] But, it was such a good title I kind
of built the whole book underneath the title.
What I'm trying to say to you in a kind of a vague way is
that I feel nervous in an organization like this,
which has real writers who plan things out on envelopes and cards,
because I just sit there until my eyeballs bleed.

[laughter] Because there's a thing called emergent behavior,
and I've really become a fan of it.
Get things right, get the characters right, get initial ideas right,
and the thing starts to run.
And you job is to keep it moving in the right direction.
But, even as in "Nation," excuse me, I'm talking about this
because it's right at the top of my mind, because actually you know
like you've hit the "pause" button, but you still get the image.
There's a piece up there, that's the current theme in "Nation,"
unless I lose another brain cell, in which case we'll probably -
look at this, I mean, [singing] "Soft, strong, pops up too,
Kleenex tissues are made for you.
When you're caught with a sudden sneeze,
Kleenex cures with speed and ease."   [stops singing].

I last heard that advertising jingle in 1962.
[laughter] Why have I got a decade's worth of --
you've all got them, in your head.
Why? Why? There was a Shipman's Paste --
oh, it's time for the questions.
Five minutes left for the first half?
Oh, that's alright.
The horror, the horror: I was a kid at my grandmother's;
commercial television had not long started.
Shipham's paste was the big advert.
And what it was, was they made pork paste, and ham paste,
and prawn paste, and turkey paste and chicken paste.
And the advert showed lines of chickens and turkeys and prawns
and piggies walking into the jars singing.
What a horrible thing!   And little kids were seeing this!

"You will enjoy Shipham's."
Ughh, the horror, the horror; it comes back.
It's just strange; now I'm down to these last three brain cells.
There's a great cluster
of advertising jingles, just hanging in there.
I can't remember the number of my hotel room today,
but I can remember an ancient jingle.
So I'd better go on and write the next few books while there's a few
brain cells left.
Now we're going to have the fun part,
because I recognize you all here as fans.
There's no one really here who's come along and said,
"This Pratchett fellow, I wonder what he's like then?"
At least, if there was anyone like that, they've left by now.

[laughter] So, the Q and A bit is always the funniest bit
of my things, and so let's have the usual five seconds of humiliated
and embarrassed silence and I'll take the first question.
[laughter] Male Speaker: Hello?   Terry Pratchett: Hello.

Male Speaker: Sorry, too loud.   Over here.

Terry Pratchett: Oh, oh, oh.   Right, right.

OK. Yup, yup.
Male Speaker: I've always wanted to know about Rincewind.
Like more, like, where is he from?
I mean, he's from Morepork, but what about the rest?
Terry Pratchett: Well, wherever he is from is possibly immaterial,
since he obviously didn't stay there for very long.
I don't know.
Some back story for him would actually be nice.
That's why a book with a little bit more Rincewind --
we know he was very traumatized on his sixth birthday,
because he was given a little badge that said "I am five."

[laughter] That's mentioned somewhere.
And a big girl burst his balloon, but they always do
that sooner or later, don't they?   One day, if I am spared,

I will probably explore him a little further.
Male Speaker: Thank you.
Male Speaker: First of all, let me say thank you for many happy hours.
[applause] I have a question for you about how you go about your writing.
When you create a character that's so rich,
I think oftentimes we get a sense that we're only feeling part of it.
Do you write a long back story for a character and then just put the bits
in that you think are appropriate, or does it just develop over time?
Terry Pratchett: No, it's all smoke and mirrors, honestly.
But, I have to say, very good mirrors
and often some quite classy smoke.
Okay, being serious a moment, I look for the trigger points.
The way to describe a character is not
with two pages about that character.
The way to describe a character is to give them mannerisms,
ways of talking and acting which will --
because we're all human beings, we kind of have a lot in common
about the way we judge people
and remember people and think about people.
I put in the little triggers,
which will make you think subconsciously
"Ah, that kind of guy."
You know, like: He's in an accordion band, okay,
obviously some kind of axe-murderer.
[laughter] So the back story tends to happen of its own accord.
But I get very worried when people think I put in actual thought.
It happens more on a visceral level.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and I've actually got, as it were,
today's writing planned out.
I think that's because some Australian guy has my brain
on timeshare overnight.
I suppose what I'm really saying: I think about it very hard
for a very long time, and stuff seems to turn up.
Okay, now we're over here.
Male Speaker: I was wondering where did you get the idea
for "The Truth," because that seemed
like such a cutting commentary on the media.
What sparked that?
Terry Pratchett: Some of the stuff in "The Truth" happened to me.
Not the vampires and trolls, obviously.
I was the guy that interviewed a steeplejack
who people thought he was threatening to commit suicide.
He was up on this bridge, which was a suicide bridge,
and if you were lucky you hit the river,
and if you were unlucky you hit the road.
Actually, come to think of it you were just unlucky if you jumped.
And, it was swaying, and he was Polish,
and I couldn't understand him.
Then the police finally found his wife.
I was a decoy; "Keep him talking while we find his wife."
And she came out, and she came to the bottom of the ladder
and shouted up, "You get back down here!
I'm going to take your trousers away another time."
Lots of stuff in "The Truth," in some way,
reflected my experience as a young journalist.
They gave me a pad and a pencil,
and I had this power, which I had not earned.
Cool! Male Speaker: Hey, thanks very much for showing up here.
We're really grateful.
Terry Pratchett: They have my children.


I'll just stand here.
No, okay. You try and balance serious character drama and satire,
and I was ever wondering if you were tempted to,
especially for maybe a long-running storyline you were tired of,
to write something with more drama, something negative?
Maybe something, you know, darker where major characters went bad.
You know, unhappiness in a general sense?
Terry Pratchett: The difficulty is while certain amounts
of that stuff is allowable, it's not allowable to pick up someone
like Vimes and make him bad,
just because it's a good, dramatic thing to do.
There actually has to be some kind of reason to it.
I think the books are getting darker.
Certainly in the upcoming children's book...
[laughter] My heroine commits murder.
You see, it's a children's book, you can do that sort of thing with her
because she's feels very sorry about it afterwards.
[laughter] I don't know what the future holds.
So much of the stuff I've written has surprised me.
Who knows what's going to be next?
Male Speaker: Personally, do you ever feel tempted?


[laughter] Male Speaker: I was wondering
if there's ever any process that you go through every single time,
some ritual that you have before you start writing
or something that you do?
I've heard about authors that -- one author had to have a fresh apple
in their top drawer of his -- book ...
Terry Pratchett: I must have oxygen.
No, part of the journalistic background, you write where you can,
leaning against a wall if you have to.
In phone boxes, because, certainly, as a journalist, I used to have
to phone over copy, and I'd write --
so, you can't afford to have funny little ways,
because if you don't produce the stuff,
the editor comes and shouts at you.
I do have a daily ritual, which is one of sheer panic as I sit down,
but after that it goes away.
But, no. Currently I write, when I'm traveling, I write on an HP3.
I mean, it's about that size with a Bluetooth keyboard that unfolds.
It's all very James Bond.
It's all very tiny, and it doesn't count as a computer.
It is a PDA and is accepted as such.
It's ever so teeny and weeny, but I get the stuff done.
And, I don't get hassled very much at immigration.
Oh, I'd better not tell you my homeland security story, no.
Okay, so? Male Speaker: How did you decide
that a con artist was the best person to reform civil government?
Terry Pratchett: Well, ah.
[laughter] I was explaining Moist von Lipwig to a friend of mine,
a friend of mine who's not actually a fan of mine.
That's why I deem to have him as a friend, because he's a man of taste.
And I said, the thing about Moist von Lipwig is he's a con man,
he's a con man by choice, he's in it for the kick,
for the crack as the Irish say, but I won't say it over here.
And, what puzzles him is the more he tells people he's conning them,
the more they laugh and give him money.
And he said -- my friend said, "Yes, there's a bit of autobiography


[laughter] Actually, it's going right back to Elizabethan days.
If you wanted to, basically like tax farming, but,
Lord Vetinari has his own way of doing things.
And I really, really like the Vetinari method.
You just give one person lots of power, lots of responsibility,


A bit more of that, and the world would be a much better place.

Female Speaker: After I read "Going Postal," it sounded
like you really wrapped everything up,
so what was your inspiration for "Making Money?"
Or did you just really just want to make a sequel to that?
Terry Pratchett: I really wanted to make money.
No, no. I had another idea, and I'd kind of wrapped things up;
he'd finished at the Post Office.
But, Vetinari would not be the kind of guy to let Moist off the hook.
He's not fair.
And, so I thought -- and also, I wanted to write the book
because gold is a fantasy.
I mean there is that question that Moist asks: on a desert island,
what's worth more, a bag of vegetables or a bag of gold?
It's the bag of vegetables.
In the city, what's worth more, a bag of gold or a bag of vegetables?
It's the bag of gold.
So the value actually is in the city, not in the gold.
The city has decided, that is, civilization has decided,
that shiny metal that you can't eat or make a blade
out of is actually valuable.   And we agree to this fantasy.

And that just got me started.
Male Speaker: How did "Good Omens" come about
and what was that collaboration like?
Terry Pratchett: I'll give you the quick form.
Neil [Gaiman] wrote a couple of pages of a story.
He didn't know how it worked.
He sent it to me, and I didn't know how it worked, either.
I kept it in the bottom drawer of my desk for about a year, re-read it,
phoned him up and said, "I don't know how it ends,
but I know how it continues."
And then we found out, in those days, he had lost his original copy.
So I typed it out from the one I had, cunningly changing it
in all kinds of ways, and there was no --
apart from the fact that we sent floppy disks,
floppy disks, ask you granddad.
[laughter] We sent floppy disks to each other every day
with the work in progress.
We used to speak at least once every day, shout out things to each other,
and one of us would go and write stuff.
I kept the master copy, which enabled me to put in extra stuff
without telling Neil, who then took it out without telling me.

I'm sure Neil must have been asked this in this very tent
in previous years and has probably said almost exactly the same thing.
I wrote most of the kids, and anything to do with Agnes Nutter.
I'd say when you got right down to it, we both worked
on absolutely everything.
Neil's wife couldn't tell who wrote who.
In fact, she tended to get it very wrong, just by reading the thing.
And I'm sure Neil would have told you this.
When we were going through the proofs with the publisher,
Neil laughed at something and said,
"That was a good joke you did there."
And I said, "I didn't put that in."
It had kind of happened -- written by some kind of joint character.
It was a lot of fun.   Money didn't get in the way.

Is that true?   Yeah, okay, right.

Money didn't get in the way.
We divided it down the middle, and it was all right.

Sir? Male Speaker: Yes, the first Discworld books were a really direct
parody of the fantasy genre.
But the later books really became a setting of their own.
Was this a conscious decision on your part
or did it emerge from the content?
Terry Pratchett: No, it was a straightforward evolution.
I found I could do more and more stuff.
And really, taking potshots at the fantasy genre,
while it's a certain amount of fun, is not a job for life.
So, once I'd got things established, then the sky was the limit.
Male Speaker: Mr. Pratchett, when I was 14,
I began to get an inkling of who I was.
And I didn't know if anyone else was like that.
And my uncle handed me "Small Gods."   And now I'm 22 [sobs].

Thank you.   Thank you so much.

Terry Pratchett: And do you know who you are?
[laughter] No.   A serious question.

Male Speaker: I could drop this and shave the beard tomorrow.

Just as you've dropped the hat.
And now you can go and have a pint somewhere normal.
Terry Pratchett: Oh, I see what you mean.
Oh, absolutely, yes.   The hat is a Zen disguise.

Male Speaker: Yes, exactly.   Terry Pratchett: I am not the hat.

Male Speaker: You are not the hat, but people think you are.
Terry Pratchett: But if I take the hat off, I'm just this guy
who no one's going to buy a drink for.
But, with the hat on ...
Male Speaker: Yes, everyone will know who you are.
Terry Pratchett: I don't have to buy a beer.
Thank you.
"Small Gods" was a book that I really enjoyed writing.
It was a very intense experience for me.
Male Speaker: Yeah, it was a very intense experience for me.
Terry Pratchett: Especially
to see how the book accelerated to its destination.
Because there was no other way it could possibly have ended.
It simply would refuse to change in any way.
Thank you very much.   Male Speaker: Yes, thank you.

Female Speaker: Gosh, how do you follow that?
What influenced you to become a writer?
Terry Pratchett: I wasn't any good at anything else.
[laughter and applause] Female Speaker: Works for me.
Terry Pratchett: Well, kind of building on an earlier question.
When you brought back Moist von Lipwig it was fairly exciting,
because he seemed like a single book character,
much as in "Monstrous Regiment."
Do you have any plans on bringing back those characters, too?
Terry Pratchett: "Monstrous Regiment" really was kind
of a one-joke book in a way; but a totally real joke.
Once you get past the clear fantasy stuff , the trolls, the vampires,
etc., that stuff happened.   It used to happen a lot.

It happened in the American Civil War, it happened all over Europe.
It's amazing what women could get away with,
in battle, disguised as men.
There were all kinds of reasons why they were able
to live among men without being found out.
I haven't got time to talk about this, so, basically,
there's one very good reason.   Men are dumb.


[laughter and applause] I mean, they don't notice
when their wife has actually had her hair dyed a different color,
and that's their wife.   So, it's possible.

It's nice to have those characters out there,
when they may be the right characters for a plot.
But then, Moist was a new character at one point,
and look what happened to him.   So who knows?

Who knows?
I don't. Male Speaker: Hi, thanks for coming and also thanks
for giving me a mental break from my textbooks in college with this book.
Discworld fans can mentally, usually, divide your books
into the four different categories.
But you've been creating these new series lately, with Tiffany.
Do you think that trend's going to continue?
Will you do more, like all over Discworld, more branching
out from your normal -- Terry Pratchett: I believe there's going
to be far more branching out.
Ankh Morepork's always going to be there,
because it's the city where things can happen.
But, I want to explore new things.   And will definitely do so.

And that, I think, is the end of the questions, because I'd like to wind
up with a little piece of philosophy [laughs] .I've just been working
with lady on a book called "The Folklore of Discworld,"
and she's a renowned folklorist.
It's a way of teaching people about folklore using what I have,
as it were, borrowed and put in Discworld.
Not far from where we used to live, many years ago,
there was a standing stone, which at night, at the full moon
and New Year's Eve, no, Midsummer's Eve would dance
around the field that it was in.
And, if you could get to the pot of gold that was
in the hole it normally occupied before it flattened you,
you could keep it.
When we moved in, I went to see this stone and there it was in the field.
And, for the next 25 years I never went back.
And I especially never went back at night time.
And the folklore lady said, "Is this because you were frightened
that you'd see the stone dancing?"
And I said, "No, it was because I was frightened that it wouldn't."
Because, wouldn't it be nice in a world with homeland security,
and terrorism, and the European Union, and policemen and rules;
wouldn't it be nice if there was just a space
where a stone might dance?
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen.